Accommodating Your Audience
CS 4001
Mary Jean Harrold
1
Meatrix: Does it create effective
Ethos?
 Knowledgeable about issue
 Fair
 Bridge built to audience
Pathos?




CS 4001
Concrete language
Specific examples and illustration
Narratives
Words, metaphors, and analogies with appropriate
connotations
Mary Jean Harrold
2
Accommodating Your Audience
 One-sided versus multi-sided arguments
 Understanding your audience
 Treating different views
 Appealing to a supportive audience
 Appealing to a neutral or undecided audience
 Appealing to a resistant audience
CS 4001
Mary Jean Harrold
3
One-sided versus Multisided
Arguments
 Types of arguments
 One-sided…
 Multisided…
 Research suggests when to use each
CS 4001
Mary Jean Harrold
4
Understanding Your Audience (1)
 Book suggests placing audience on scale
strongly
supportive
strongly
opposed
 May need to “invent” your audience
CS 4001
Mary Jean Harrold
5
Understanding Your Audience (2)
 Try to assess what audience knows
 Audience for term paper??
 Other examples of audiences for whom you may write???
 Determine level of background to give
 Too little leads to??
 Too much leads to??
 Determine level of formality
 Use of “I” or “we” or another actor
 Use of active or passive voice
 Understanding audience may take more time than
researching topic!!
CS 4001
Mary Jean Harrold
6
Understanding Your Audience (3)
 Understanding audience is problem for
professional rhetoricians (e.g., politicians,
advertising executives, researchers)
 So people since the time of the Sophists have
developed a variety of “tricks” to use for
assessing and understanding the audience
CS 4001
Mary Jean Harrold
7
Understanding Your Audience (4)
 Most of the time, you know the audience
because you’re part of the audience
 If you’re part of the audience, what will you know
about them?
 Examples??
 If not part of audience, don’t consider
individuals, but consider an abstraction of the
audience—what they know, what they expect,
how they will react
 Examples??
CS 4001
Mary Jean Harrold
8
Understanding Your Audience (5)
 Understand discourse conventions
 Flow of words for that interpretive community who
somehow set the rules
 How can you find out about discourse conventions?
 What are some examples of interpretive communities
and their discourse conventions?
CS 4001
Mary Jean Harrold
9
Treating Different Views (1)
 Appealing to a supportive audience
 What approach should you use?
 What are some examples?
 Appealing to a neutral or undecided audience
 What approach should you use?
CS 4001
Mary Jean Harrold
10
Treating Different Views (2)
 Appealing to a supportive audience
 What approach should you use?
 What are some examples?
 Appealing to a neutral or undecided audience
 What approach should you use?
 Toulmin argument:
 claim
 reason (grounds to support reason)
 warrant (backing to support warrant)
CS 4001
Mary Jean Harrold
11
Treating Different Views (3)
 Rebutting evidence—how?
CS 4001
Mary Jean Harrold
12
Treating Different Views (4)
 Appealing to a resistant audience
 Delayed thesis
 Rogerian
CS 4001
Mary Jean Harrold
13
Discussion (in groups of 5)
 What is the thesis of the Meatrix?
 What type of audience does it target? Explain?
 Suppose the audience is resistant, give an
outline of either a delayed-thesis or Rogerian
argument for the same thesis
CS 4001
Mary Jean Harrold
14